GUWAHATI: A huge controversy has erupted over Google satellite maps showing areas of Arunachal Pradesh in Mandarin rather than Hindi or English,

effectively making them appear as part of China. The changes were first noticed on Thursday, just hours before Friday’s crucial Sino-Indian talks over border dispute.

Apart from some major cities like Itanagar and Tawang, most other regions have been marked in Chinese. What’s more, the map shows Arunachal’s southern boundary with Assam and northern boundary with China in broken lines, while the state’s eastern and western boundaries with Bhutan and Myanmar are shown in continuous white lines.

There is suspicion in some quarters that Chinese trouble-makers may have hacked into Google and changed the names. Google authorities could not be contacted at the time of filing this report. The images have caused a flutter in New Delhi and Arunachal.

‘‘This is shocking. How could Google change the names of places of a sovereign country without the country’s knowledge?’’ fumed Congress’s West Arunachal MP Takam Sanjoy.

Former BJP MP from the state, Kiren Rijiju, said this was an old Chinese gameplan. ‘‘The Chinese know how to time their statements ahead of a bilateral meeting. This map surfaced just when the two countries were to discuss the border dispute. Had Google changed the names of Chinese locations, Beijing would have summoned Google officials. India, too, should deal with it firmly,’’ said Rijiju, who had raised the issue of Chinese military incursions in Arunachal in the Lok Sabha.

Sanjoy has informed AICC general secretary in charge of Arunachal, Narayan Swami, and urged the Centre to take action against Google.

‘‘The government should come out openly with its stand and take Google to task. Google must explain under what authority did they include Chinese language in Arunachal Pradesh’s map,’’ the MP said.

its not new/recent. its been been there since long time same as mentioned above (more then 2 years; since i started browsing google earth for that region). journalists wants to add some masala to recent sino india talks. You can pin any place in any language any time on google earth. just chines were fast to do before Indians placing pins and land marks on AP.

NEW DELHI: Search engine Google on Saturday admitted its "mistake" of wrong depiction of certain areas of Arunachal Pradesh as parts of China and said its maps would be rectified shortly. "Earlier, this week, as part of routine update to Google Earth, we published new data for the Arunachal Pradesh region that changed the depiction of certain place names in the product. The change was a result of a mistake in our processing of new map data," a spokesperson for the search giant said in a statement.

The spokesperson was reacting after a media report which highlighted that Google map showed certain areas of Arunachal Pradesh as parts of China. The media report had raised suspicion about the search engine being hacked by Chinese considering that Beijing has been laying claim over entire Arunachal Pradesh, which India rejects. "We are in the process of reverting the data to its previous state and expect the change to be visible in the product shortly," the spokesperson said. "We would like to clarify that this issue did not impact our depiction of international borders," the statement said.

Google Earth is a service of Google that lets users to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings. This is not the first time that Google Earth has come in for criticism in India. Indian security agencies had earlier been complaining that Google Earth exposes Indian defense and other sensitive installations.